


A Thousand Arrows Seeking

by mstigergun



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Death, Corruption, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Purple Hawke, Red Lyrium, Sad Ending, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-06 22:03:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5432387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mstigergun/pseuds/mstigergun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The letter comes, and he could tear the world asunder.</i>
</p><p>Hawke leaves to offer his aid to the Inquisition. He doesn't return. And though Fenris is not one for hope, he does have this final, grim insistence: that this is not a reality he will permit to stand. After hearing whispers of a lost Tevinter temple, he heads south. He will do whatever it takes, will pay whatever cost.</p><p><i>I am yours</i>, Fenris has said, and it is a vow he intends to keep.</p><p>(Completed for Dragon Age Reverse Big Bang 2015)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> I was so fortunate to work with the inimitable [verthien](http://verthien.tumblr.com/) for this piece, whose art was both deeply upsetting (in an excellent way!) and incredibly inspiring. He's been enthusiastic throughout the entire process and, like, wow, I went into this planning on writing a fic, and came out with a friend. As a bonus, in his infinite generosity, Tim made a second piece of art to accompany the fic. The original jumping off point is [this gorgeous piece](http://verthien.tumblr.com/post/135425276162/aaaaaaaaaaaa-its-posting-day-today) ; the second piece you can see below, and it is a perfect 'cover' to this fic. Thank you so much, Tim! You are exceptional. <3!
> 
> ([VanHelsing019](http://archiveofourown.org/users/VanHelsing019/pseuds/VanHelsing019) also wrote a piece inspired by this artwork, which has a happy ending and features a bunch of our beloved DA2 characters and is a _totally_ different take on this, so check out ["His Markings Ran Red"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5456471) if you're so inclined!)
> 
> Major thanks to all of the folks who had a look over the various stages of drafting: [enviouspride](http://enviouspride.tumblr.com/), [openthepocketwatch](http://openthepocketwatch.tumblr.com/), and [neurotrophicfactors](http://neurotrophicfactors.tumblr.com/). And a very special thank you to [becausenobreeches](http://becausenobreeches.tumblr.com/), who gave me the most thorough and thoughtful critique I've ever had. To say that they had a major and important effect on the entire narrative would be an understatement: Reagan is a phenomenal beta and I am so very grateful for all of their help. This would be a very different, and significantly less effective, story without Reagan's input, and wow I am lucky. Thank you to _everyone_ who helped out. This was a super dark story to write, and you are all my little rays of sunshine and goodness and you make all the difference.
> 
>  **Proper Reader's Notes**  
>  I've treated this narrative in a sort of non-linear way, essentially structuring the entire thing around a section from the Chant of Light. Although the whole thing is in present tense, there are different layers of the present. This is, on occasion, not clearly flagged, but that's to a purpose: I hope that it's jarring in the same way that, for Fenris, the present-present comingles with the past, which also feels... ongoing. Alive.
> 
> I've also probably committed horrible abuses against lore-established magic and how the Fade works (and how lyrium works!), but we're just going to stick that under the header of _mysterious Tevinter temple!_ and be done with it.
> 
> Also, like, beware the ending. This is a sad fic, and it doesn't get _un_ sad. Mind those tags, friends.

 

_ _

> * * *
> 
> _In the long hours of the night_
> 
> _When hope has abandoned me,_
> 
> _I will see the stars and know_
> 
> _Your Light remains._
> 
> (Trials 1:2)

*

The letter comes, and he could tear the world asunder.

After everything, this.

His gauntlets prick the skin of his leg, body curved downward – the shape of a bow, a bridge, a frown. The shape of being broken. He sits in a tavern filthy enough that it would have made Hawke feel at home. Beneath his feet, straw, tacky floorboards.

Just beneath that, the Void.

He reads the letter again. And then again. Scours the script to see if he can spot an error, a lie. Anything. Something that will offer him a glimmer of _hope_.

Instead, the bare truth: Hawke – the foolish, _thoughtless_ man – gave himself for an organization as of yet untested. For a leader with nothing more than a foul power to commend her.

Fenris might be surprised that it’s come to this, but it is precisely what he’s feared since the morning he woke to find Hawke gone, his familiar weight and warmth vanished from Fenris’s side. The note scribbled in Hawke’s uneven hand and left for Fenris to find had meant little enough.

 _Duty_ , he claimed. _Responsibility_.

A fool’s errand, and an insipid romantic notion – that somehow Hawke had to involve himself. Had to do more than he has already done.

So often Hawke’s _nobility_ , tempered though it is with his sly humour and his wide-eyed confusion, leads him to dark places. Too often it has threatened to take him from Fenris. He isn’t surprised to see it’s succeeded.

Fenris would have gone. Of course he would have, ridiculous though the task seemed. Hawke had but to ask, and Fenris would have walked the length of the world at his side – through wind and snow and the wretched misery of the chaos in the south. _I am yours_ , he has said, less an intimacy and more a bare statement of fact. He would have gone, could have chased after Hawke but –

_I have to do this alone. You mean too much to me to risk._

_I am yours_ , and so Fenris stayed.

Instead of standing at Hawke’s side, then, instead of lingering in the broad and warm shadow he casts, Fenris was resigned to this: isolation, cold nights, battles made all the more wretched for the anger that sings beneath his skin, the _unfamiliarity_ of not having a laughing mage at his back, air crackling with a magic Fenris had once found so deeply unsettling.

He would have gone, but he didn’t. Resigned to the margins of this absurd journey, left to wander the coast of the Marches while he turned the buzzing, frenetic energy inside of his ribs into _justice_.

And so the letter arrives. The letter arrives, and Fenris isn’t _surprised_. Only sick to see his suspicions play out. Sick of all of this.

Others would find it difficult to breathe. Perhaps sink to the ground, cry out in broken sounds. That is what grief looks like; he’s seen it often enough to know.

Instead, he commits the words to memory, letters in Varric’s familiar script pressed so firmly into the insides of his eyelids that they become as permanent as the lyrium veins that trail up and down his skin. Marks Hawke has memorized with his fingers, marks he understands for all that they offer – power, but at the cost of great pain. Magic, though Fenris would have none.

None except Hawke.

The pain is almost the same, sharp enough to excise what remains of him beyond its scope. He is reduced to wild hurt, one that lives beneath his ribs, one that’s pressed into his skin. Just the same.

Fenris folds the letter. He pays the barkeep and leaves, tugging the hood of his cloak over his head, a meager enough protection against the howling wind. The fur lining his hood brushes against the skin of his neck, his cheeks – errant caresses, which feel, instead, like needles upon him. All the world’s sensations reduced to their very worst: the cold, an endless ache; the darkness, the Void; the distant light of the moon above, a searing brightness.

He heads out into the woods, the sky above an endless swath of black. The stars are stark white, pinpricks made with perfect accuracy. Dimples in the separation between here and there, beyond _this_ place and what lies beyond.

It’s that hazy thought that does it, eyes flicking up to stare at the stars as the cold wind snaps at his cloak.

 _Hawke stayed behind_ , Varric wrote. _Of course he did – always has to be the hero_.

Hawke stayed.

He left Fenris, and then he remained in the Fade.

It’s as simple as finding his way back to him. From _this_ place to _that_ one. Already, it’s been done. The Inquisitor is proof enough of that.

 _I am yours_ , he has said.

And so he will be again.

If anyone is to survive such a thing, it will be Hawke.

If anyone is to retrieve him, it will be Fenris.


	2. ii

> _I have heard the sound_
> 
> _A song in the stillness,_
> 
> _The echo of Your voice,_
> 
> _Calling creation to wake from its slumber._
> 
> (Trials 1:3)

*

The idea is mad from the start. But desperation makes fools of all men, and so he _tries_. There is no alternative.

When he wakes, he thinks of Hawke. When he dreams, it is always of Hawke. In the space between breaths, the moments between waking and dreaming, when the sound of his own heartbeat fades after battle, he can almost imagine he hears that familiar laugh. Ghosts in the moments between, like a knife slipped between ribs.

He hasn’t a choice. Even if he did, he would choose this.

In many ways, it’s fortunate that he has spent many years tracking and slaughtering Tevinters, has learned all of the things they fear and how to make those fears into vicious realities. He becomes the ghost in the dark, sharp armour and brutal revenge, a slave who glories in reprisal. And while slavers are not cultists, one beast is much like the next, and the Marches grow riddled indeed with black-armoured wretches from the north.

The first few don’t talk. Eventually, he finds one who does, a mage in fluttering robes, more paper than man.

Man enough to still bleed, to feel Fenris’s fingers around the thick muscle of his heart. Mortal enough to go limp when Fenris tears his heart from his chest, sputtering blood against the soil beneath him, hot and viscous.

He becomes a series of actions, small and finite. Things familiar enough to be unthinking. He places one foot in front of the next. He travels. He sleeps. He dreams. Occasionally, he eats. He murders Venatori.

He does not stop thinking of Hawke.

Fenris crosses the Waking Sea. He thinks, for a moment, of travelling to Skyhold. If the woman was able to open a portal into the Fade before, she will be able to do it again. She might have reservations, but Fenris can be persuasive. If required. Even if she is surrounded by all of her forces. Even if she _has_ won Varric’s loyalty, though the dwarf’s taste has always been questionable.

But the sputtering mage’s insistence hounds him, the man whose wet and still-beating heart Fenris had held in his hand. A lost Tevinter temple where the Veil thinned like the knees of trousers: made ragged by the endless friction of magic against the place. Where the threads might slip wide enough for someone to fall _through._ That, Fenris thinks, is a promise more likely than gaining help from a woman who left Hawke behind. He and the Inquisitor may fight a common enemy, but that doesn’t make them allies.

Though Fenris isn’t certain they now fight the same enemy. He isn’t certain he fights anyone, except when pressed.

He fights the way things are instead. He refuses to capitulate, not in this. Not when he can still feel Hawke against him when his eyes fall shut; not when he can hear Hawke laugh when the world falls to silence.

The region is frigid, carved of ice and snow. Cold enough that he spends dwindling coin on soft boots of scraped leathers that keep the worst of the damp and cold out. The air tastes like ice, sharp and crisp and clear all at once, and then it doesn’t. Once he pushes past the dwindling trail of villages, each filled with men and women thinner and more hollow-eyed than in the last, all he can smell is the sharp tang of magic. Something foul and familiar against the back of his tongue, something that sings to the lyrium within him –

A song sickeningly familiar, the dizzying drone of too much magic.

Hawke was able to drown it out, larger and brighter than the incantations hissing beneath Fenris’s skin. He was the sun to the endless dark of night.

He _is_ the sun.

Fenris will not allow Hawke to become a past. He is a present and a future. A now and a forever.

If someone else were to hear the turn of his thoughts, they might think him romantic – but there is no romance in necessity, no romance in despair and the stubborn insistence that this not be the world in which he lives.

He finds the ruins in the mountains. He finds the Venatori sent there to parse out its potential.

He tears them to pieces, hot blood spattered across the snow, across ancient stone and forgotten artefacts. He breaks them, their screams swallowed by the hungry sky overhead, by the mountains in the distance. He leaves them a pile of broken limbs and clotting blood. Nothing more than they should be: ruin.

Fenris does keep a mage, shackled and clasped away behind bars. A binding that is deeply fitting, one that provides him with a satisfying symmetry, even in these dark days.

He knows how dangerous a wounded animal can be. He would see her jaw bound first, her teeth pulled from her gums. So he cracks her legs, leaves them useless beneath her, her hands smashed to pieces.

She stops crying soon enough. She realizes there’s no point.

“Your Master wanted to pull a demon through the Veil at this place,” he says, watching her as she cries on the stone floor. Impassive. “How.”

Her eyes flash up, red-rimmed. Glassy and dark against her pale skin. The mage sniffs, a sound half-whimper and entirely pathetic. “The Veil is weakened,” she says. “Going _in_ is hard; coming _out_ is easy, almost. It’s what this place _is,_ a window in.”

“And something could come out,” says Fenris. “Some _one_.”

Her eyes are wide. She nods. “Yes.”

“If you lie to me, I will know.” He doesn’t say what he will do. Fenris is a wolf of the Imperium; she knows how dangerous his teeth are, just how wide his maw can stretch.

Still, the mage nods, clutching her broken hands against her chest. “First,” she says, “You’ll need lyrium.”

An impossible task. He scoffs, pacing just beyond the bars of her cell. There is none, not in large enough quantity; he tore his way through the Venatori supplies, and saw precisely what they brought with them to this outpost. This ancient temple, a collection of tumbled stones and broken arches, the remnants of a corrupt empire with ambitions even fouler.

“There is none,” he says. “Something else.”

The mage swallows. Shifts against the stone. “The area is bristling with it. Red lyrium –”

He stops in place.

Fenris has seen it, yes. How well he knows it – well enough to avert his attention, to put a great span of distance between himself and the lyrium. Even as it tugs at him, tiny hooks beneath his flesh.

The mage prattles on, gaining momentum as she spools out theories before her, all of which are coppery with her own blood, her own desperate scramble for survival. Frantic, as if any, in the end, will save her.

Fenris half-listens, his thoughts already slipping elsewhere, drawn like a compass toward north. Inexorable.

Already, it’s been weeks. Hawke may have survived this long. _Has_ survived this long; he must have, because there is no other permitted reality. But the hour grows late indeed, and any wasted moments –

Fenris scowls. “I shall gather the lyrium. And then?”

“A mage can –”

“No,” he says, flat. “You will remain in your place.”

Again, the woman swallows. A thick sound, her pained breath loud beneath it. “Your – markings,” she tries. “With enough power behind them, you could call the ancient spells to life. They’ll be difficult to control, but –”

Control has never been beyond Fenris’s grasp. He leaves her in the tiny cell, which is secreted away at the base of the temple. Outside, the sky is a furious blue, the wind howling across its wide expanse. Fenris pushes his way past the Venatori camp and toward the distant shadows of the mountain.

He knows what he must do, however foul the thought feels in his mind. Beneath that all, hope beats within him, wary and dark and insistent. It is an ugly hope, covered in gore and sharp-edged enough to tear the world to shreds. It is a hope that extends to Hawke and Hawke alone. Fenris will keep none for himself.

He finds the lyrium, following its dark light, its insistent song. Using the edge of a short blade he plucked from a dead Venatori, he hacks at the mineral. At first, it resists, blade skittering off its hard edges. He twists and slashes, working until the tendons of his arms ache, until sweat leaves the edges of his hair damp even in this cold. Even as his own body trembles not from exertion but from –

Some wild _knowing._ Something animal in him that sees the red lyrium for what it is.

But he knows what _he_ is, and he will see the Veil unravelled. He will have Hawke by his side. A necessity.

He thrusts the blade at the lyrium, and it splinters across the snow. Hundreds of tiny shards, each fat and red as drops of blood and hot enough to sizzle their way past the hard crust of ice.

At once, the song begins, a humming in his teeth, a ceaseless drone against the inside of his skull.

He hears its vile singing, and he thinks of Hawke.

When he returns the lyrium to the temple, he can feel the shift as readily as if the entire world convulsed beneath his feet. It’s hungry, this magic lying in wait in the coldest, darkest corner of the mountains. It’s hungry and it’s lonely, ancient spells that respond to him as a kicked dog wriggling at its master’s feet: the lyrium that burns beneath his skin calls to the lost magic, forgotten incantations. He is a key that will unclasp the lock, and unclasp it he will.


	3. iii

> _How can we know You?_
> 
> _In the turning of the seasons, in life and death,_
> 
> _In the empty space where our hearts_
> 
> _Hunger for a forgotten face?_
> 
> (Trials 1:4)

*

“Nothing says fun like being trapped in a blizzard,” Hawke intones. He sniffs, peering past the mouth of the cave they’re secreted away inside.

“I was not aware any of this was meant to be fun.”

Hawke turns and shoots him a smile as bright as the fire he has crackling near the cave’s entrance. “It’s always fun when I’m around.”

“Fun,” repeats Fenris, the word an unfamiliar shape in his mouth. “Perhaps disastrous.”

A huffed laugh. Hawke shrugs, exaggerated, and tugs his cloak tighter around his broad shoulders. “We’ve done the _disastrous_ part. I thought we might be overdue for something a little less grim.”

Such hope, Fenris thinks, arms folded as he stares out at the yowling blizzard beyond – snow so very thick that it obliterates all sight lines. It leaves him wary, uncomfortable: the Templars are too close for such poor vision. They remain eager to catch Hawke, still hungry for whatever it is they call justice. The Templars have not yet relented, though Fenris and Hawke have given them nothing but failure.

Let them come in their shining armour, if they brave the storm. Fenris will kill them all the same.

Hawke sighs, a long sound. He turns and wanders closer to the fire. Closer to Fenris. Rubs a hand against his beard, thoughtless. “I wonder how everyone’s doing.” He says it lightly, but Fenris knows better.

“No doubt enjoying better weather,” he says, shifting his weight.

“We can hope! Sunshine and fresh air are just about the only things that would make any of this – worthwhile.”

Fenris watches him, evaluating.

He understands pain. He understands regret. Intimate friends, though their friendship is bitter indeed. “You did as you felt you must.”

Another shrug, Hawke rubbing his hands together over the fire, though surely if he were cold he could remedy that with a mere flicker of magic. “I just worry,” he says distantly, staring down at the crackling fire. Eyes dark. “After everything –”

He stops. Fenris waits.

Then, “Being around me is a great deal of fun, before the _incredibly dangerous_ part. The _very likely deadly_ part. Someone should start warning people away. _May cause destruction to cities and entire ways of life_.” Hawke tries for a smile. He fails.

Fenris steps forward, coming to stand at Hawke’s side. Arms crossed, though he watches Hawke now – the shine of his eyes, the shape of his mouth, the tension in his shoulders, which have carried far too much of late. He is a man ill-suited to this life, but –

“I am here,” Fenris says.

“I know,” Hawke breathes. He reaches, scrubs a hand against his unruly hair. “Although the smarter thing would probably be to – _not_ be. You could have gone with Merrill. Or Isabela. Maker knows she’d have loved to get you on her ship.”

Fenris huffs out a breath, hard. “If you suggest the _mage_ next, I may yet leave.”

Hawke’s mouth twitches into a brief smile. “No, you’re just travelling with a different one.” A pause, silence except for the wind outside, the snapping fire, the sound of Hawke breathing. Then, softer, voice rasped at its edges, “You were right, though. What does magic touch that it doesn’t spoil? Meredith was mad, yes, but –”

An irritated sound escapes Fenris’s throat, one he might tamp down were he capable of such things when he is this weary, this exhausted from endless _running._ So much of his life spent being pursued, but this is worse, unfamiliar because he must guard not only his own well-being but Hawke’s.

“Don’t be a fool,” he says, flat. “You did as you must.”

“But –”

“The world is ugly. Even _you_ can’t fix that. It would be arrogance to assume otherwise.”

For a moment, silence. Then, “I _have_ always thought a great deal of myself,” Hawke tries weakly.

Fenris scoffs, ignoring Hawke’s comment. The man tosses them out in an effort to distract, to deflect; Fenris understands, but now is not the time. “There is nowhere else I would rather be than at your side,” he says, low. “You know that.”

Hawke’s gaze flashes up, holds Fenris’s. Grows soft and warm, all at once.

The corner of Fenris’s mouth curls up. “Though,” he says, “a place less prone to wretched winter _weather…”_

“You say that, but think of it this way,” offers Hawke. “Now we have an excuse to get _cozy.”_

“I wasn’t aware you required an excuse.”

Hawke laughs. Reaches out, broad palm finding the side of Fenris’s face, calloused fingers tracing the line of his jaw, the shape of his ear.

Always, he touches Fenris as though he might break. Quiet, careful.

Reverent.

Fenris makes a soft sound in his throat. He steps in closer, reaches to press a hand against the warm skin of Hawke’s neck. When he leans up to kiss him, it is, Fenris thinks, what _coming home_ must feel like, for those who have a home.

His home is a man. His home is Hawke.


	4. iv

> _You have walked beside me_
> 
> _Down the paths where a thousand arrows sought my flesh._
> 
> _You have stood with me when all others_
> 
> _Have forsaken me._
> 
> (Trials 1:5)

*

At first, they run from pursuit.

Later, they run because of Fenris, though they run _after_ instead of _away from_. They become those in pursuit, rather than those pursued.

“If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me,” Hawke insists, spattered in blood, hair stringy with viscera at the end of another long fight. He leans on his stave, gasping for breath, though he smiles all the same.

But Fenris can’t ignore how tired he seems. They’ve travel the length of the Marches. Through Nevarra and Orlais. Always on the move, always tracing down the next hint of where Tevinter slavers have trickled out of their own realm, viral agents turned toward infection, preying upon the helpless.

He would rip the heart out of the whole nation if he could. Instead, slavers suffice.

It’s a life with a sense of purpose, yes – more than they had in all their Kirkwall years, which were driven primarily by Hawke’s preternatural ability to stumble into the middle of trouble. But while they had comforts in Kirkwall, if the paltry offerings of The Hanged Man can be counted, or the empty rooms of Hawke’s home, which only ever grew _emptier,_ this life offers none.

Weeks stretch into months, bitter and cold and damp. Still, they move onwards. Hunger gnaws at the marrow of his bones sometimes, or else the persistent cold, or the humidity, depending on through which nation they move and when. How often they travelled to the Wounded Coast, and yet it’s only in trudging up and down the length of the continent that Fenris comes to realize that the whole realm is wounded. All of it bleeding, miserable, infected.

It wears on his patience, which is thin and faltering at the best of times – but it’s not just Fenris’s meager offering of good nature that wanes in the long misery of their travels. Some nights, after a long stretch of days on the road and without the promise of a warm bed for the foreseeable future, Hawke falls silent. He stills, turned inward, eyes distant and empty.

He doesn’t say that he wants to stop, because there is nowhere in the Marches that is safe for Hawke. Not after Kirkwall, not even years later. Even when they do pause for a moment in little villages dotting the countryside, they must move _onwards._

Perhaps Fenris is wrong: _he_ runs toward something; Hawke will always be running _away._

Theirs is not a comfortable life. It lacks soft beds and crackling fires, drink and consistent food, four walls and the familiarity of a city made _home._ Even the bare early days in Kirkwall seem, at times, preferable.

But Fenris would not go back, not to the darknesses that called him. He would forsake all the soft beds in the world for this sense of purpose. Besides, he has never needed more comfort than this: seeing more slavers dead.

And the familiarity of the man at his side. That, too, is a comfort, and one beyond what he has earned.

Still, it’s no life for a man such as Hawke, who has given so much of himself. His shoulders, always so upright, begin to droop, the skin beneath his eyes shadowed. Fenris sees the weight of their journeys accumulate beneath Hawke’s skin, like dust in forgotten and abandoned rooms, glory days long since resigned to squalor.

Fenris is accustomed to such things, made bright and sharp with the keen edge of purpose. Hawke doesn’t share Fenris’s aim. He is not a man made for this life, in which he _follows_ rather than _leads._ It does not suit him.

It would be selfish of Fenris to demand that he keep living it.

_Fenris_ does as he must. Too many years spent drinking among dusty corpses, too many years squandered when he could have been doing something _concrete._ He cannot live that way again.

He’s not a selfish man. He knows what he must do, and he won’t demand that of Hawke. It is a thought he holds within the cool space of his mind for weeks when first he has it. At first tentative as a flickering shadow, then certain as a day turning slowly to dusk and, beyond, the endless expanses of night.

Years have passed since Kirkwall. Perhaps they could turn their attentions to Ferelden. Though Hawke’s name is well-known, surely he might pass into obscurity in the wilds of the south; surely, he might again become invisible, a foolish and large man who always seems to stumble into coin and trouble in equal measure.

Fenris turns the thought over, again and again.

In the end, it is a cold comfort. That is a life Hawke might have, yes, but Fenris –

He cannot. That much he knows, with a nauseating certainty.

Years ago, he asked Hawke what one did when he stopped running, but building a life –

That is for other men. Fenris would have purpose over comfort, justice over obscurity, revenge over stability. He would have all of those things, until there is nothing left in him to give.

It makes him sick, this self-knowledge, his stomach tight and his chest a hollowed void. He would give all to his cause.

He will not give Hawke’s happiness, however. He will sacrifice his own, and set the man free.

Still, it takes weeks more for the words to work their way out – splinters beneath his skin. Vicious little syllables he doesn’t quite know how to set free.

But they prickle out all the same. Even Fenris can only hold on to silence for so long.

They chase another knot of slavers up the coast, rip them to ragged pieces by Fenris’s blade, the scintillating lances of Hawke’s magic. It’s then, throat thick with dust, the smell of blood and magic sharp in the air around them, that the words finally crawl their way up his throat.

“Perhaps,” he says, “it would be better if you moved on, Hawke.”

He spares a moment to think that they make an excellent team. He’s always thought as much, even when the sight of Hawke’s magic made distrust buzz beneath his skin.

It will be difficult to fight alone again. It will be difficult to be alone again.

But Fenris has never shied away from difficulty.

Hawke straightens, frowning. “What? Am I –” He glances around, forehead creasing with confusion. “I’m not in the way, am I? I can loot these ones; you take those. You know I’m good at cleaning out pockets. And splitting the work always makes it go faster, even if slavers only ever seem to have _knots of rope_ and _creepy rings_.”

Fenris frowns as Hawke continues to survey the field of battle around them. The landscape arid and miserable, ground cracked beneath them and eager for even the hot moisture of blood. High in the sky, the sun burns an angry yellow, hot enough that sweat trickles down Fenris’s back even when they’re not in combat.

“I’m not setting up camp on my own either,” Hawke continues, hands planted on his hips. His bare arms shine with sweat, sunlight catching the shape of his muscles, the tension of his forearms after exertion. “Since you always complain about how I tie the knots.”

“That’s because you do it incorrectly,” says Fenris, flat.

“I just do it _creatively,”_ offers Hawke, with a quick smile.

This isn’t at all how Fenris intended this conversation to go.

He sighs. Frowns.

He tries again, his words a little firmer, though they still squirm beneath his skin. “The life I must live is not one that will make you happy,” Fenris says, watching Hawke as he stops fidgeting. As his eyes widen, his hands going perfectly still at his sides. “Enough time has passed. You might return to Ferelden. You might make a life somewhere. Find some small measure of happiness.”

Hawke laughs, a weak sound. He scrubs one hand against the back of his head, which only has the effect of threading blood through his messy hair. “Come on,” he says, “Watching you rip the hearts out of slavers while we run from Templars? Just what I’d always dreamed of! The stuff out of fairy tales!”

“If this is a fairy tale,” Fenris says, low, “then I am the monster, Hawke. I will not bind you to this task. It is mine.”

“Won’t _bind_ me,” Hawke says. He looks away.

Fenris half expects a joke to follow. He can see it flashing behind Hawke’s eyes.

Instead, however, he looks back, wiping his cheek against his forearm to smear away some of the remaining blood. “Listen,” said with a sigh. _“Fenris.”_

He says his name like it’s spun gold. Priceless.

Fenris swallows, but stands still. He will wait.

“I did a very good job of ruining any chance we had at a _peaceful life_ when I left Kirkwall in flames behind me. I wouldn’t – _undo_ what happened, but it _did_ happen, and we’re living with the aftermath. I could very easily say the same thing to you: you could go somewhere. Be _happy.”_

“I could not,” says Fenris.

“Why?” asks Hawke.

Fenris doesn’t have an answer, not one he wishes to speak aloud. He couldn’t be from Hawke and be _contented._ He doesn’t know how to stop running. He tried, in Kirkwall, and found that inadequate.

He _is_ movement.

Years of being free, and it’s taken him this long to realize.

“You asked me once what happens when you stop running,” Hawke says into the silence.

“I did.” Words he grinds out. Tense.

Hawke’s forehead is creased with thought and concern. “I guess my answer is that I don’t know,” he says. “That I think we’re going to always be running. That it isn’t the running that matters, it’s the – It’s what happens in the breaths in between.”

_The breaths in between_. Always, the man is prone to poetry when he should be straightforward. An irritated sound catches in Fenris’s throat, his heartbeat still unsteady against his ribs. “You make no sense, Hawke.”

“It’s like – What changes, if you stop running? Nothing. You’ve still got the same mind, and the same heart, and the same memories. And so you’re either _happy_ or you’re not. And sure, the running might give you blisters, you might get tired, you might get sick of sleeping in tents instead of beds and waiting for letters at the singularly wretched places Varric picks for drops, but –” He stops. A dry laugh rasps against Hawke’s throat, and he shrugs. “The point is that I can find happiness wherever I am with you. The murder’s just a fun bonus. Who doesn’t like killing slavers?”

Fenris watches Hawke, his skin darkened by hours beneath the sun, his body worked like a weapon until he’s become all hard edges and sinew. Still he smiles like he’s tucked in a fine robe in Kirkwall.

He huffs, a little sound of disbelief. “Very well,” Fenris says.

“You’ll keep me?” Hawke asks, smile growing crooked.

“I may,” Fenris intones. “So long as you help with the looting. And setting up camp.”

“Can I also help with the bathing?” asks Hawke, eyes glinting in the hot sun, sweat trickling down the long line of his throat. “That’s my favourite part.”

“You can help with that as well,” Fenris murmurs.

_I am yours_ , he says, an iteration, an incantation.

How it has taken Fenris this many years to understand that Hawke, too, says that – in his steadiness, his wry smile, his Maker-forsaken jokes – is beyond him. But later, as Hawke moves beneath him, mouth a slick heat against the skin of Fenris’s neck, hands desperate, insistent, frantic as he touches the planes of Fenris’s body –

He hears it then. _I am yours_ , unspoken.

And Fenris believes.


	5. v

> _I have faced armies_
> 
> _With You as my shield,_
> 
> _And though I bear scars beyond counting, nothing_
> 
> _Can break me except Your absence._
> 
> (Trials 1:6)

*

Fenris wakes. Crawls from his tent, his joints full of ground glass. He stretches, squints up at the gray sky overhead – muted with the promise of a distant storm, but still bright enough to prick the backs of his eyes. He’s had enough hours of sleep; has escaped the foul song carried by the wind for moments enough. He huffs out a breath, feet finding a well-trod path through the snow – one scuffed by endless journeys through the woods and back toward the hunched temple, which is framed by the oppressive sky above and the delirious red glow of lyrium below.

He understands the aches of battle. He knows the cost of using his body as a weapon: knows it in the stiffness that lives in one elbow, the way his lower back hurts when he wakes after a night that has been especially cold.

He knows Hawke’s pains as well as his own – the way he favours one shoulder, a series of knotted muscles that have taken the brunt of his flair for drama, that bear the mark of each repeated twirl of his stave. Fenris knows how he groans in the morning, though he does his best to smother it.

It’s how Fenris knows Hawke hurts: he bites back his complaints, rather than making them the object of a monologue.

They grow older. Hawke complains, on occasion, but his words are without teeth to snap.

They both understand the alternative.

Still, Fenris sees it all the same. How very heavily he hits the bedroll at night after a long day of travel or a particularly complex battle. The looseness of his limbs, the way he twists his torso to and fro, how stiff his arms are when they fold around Fenris. He knows Hawke’s weariness in how eagerly he drops off to sleep – mouth pressed to the back of Fenris’s neck, calloused fingers slackening against whichever plane of skin they’ve rested against for the moment.

Their weariness should not please him. Their aches and pains. The lines at the corners of Hawke’s eyes. But, so long as they aren’t _slower,_ so long as they aren’t _weaker,_ it’s of little enough consequence.

Until it is. Until now.

How simple it is to believe he might wake, stiff and slow, and find Hawke similarly groaning as he stretches within the tent. How readily Fenris finds himself thinking that each shadow beneath the trees is Hawke, merely pausing to take breath. Reminding Fenris to give his prisoner water, though Fenris would rather see her suffer.

_She may be wretched, but she’s useful_ , he can hear Hawke insisting as Fenris carries yet another collection of lyrium shards to the temple, his arms burning, shoulders an endless ache.

_You pity her_ , Fenris thinks at the Hawke inside his head. The Hawke burnt into his bones, who lives in his blood and his heart. The Hawke he will return to _this_ realm; the Hawke he will insist stand once again at his side.

_Oh, you know me_ , Hawke says with a bright smile. _Rather pitiful_.

So Fenris gives her water, which she gulps down, droplets spilling from the corner of her mouth, trickling down her throat – her hands bound into awkward, ugly shapes that allow her no more than that spare movement.

It’s only afterwards, as he carries back another heavy load of singing crystals, that Fenris realizes that the voice he hears against the point of ear, the smile he sees flashing in the distance, the shadow Hawke casts –

Things as real to him as the lyrium he carries, as the magic curling and uncurling in the temple. Beckoning.

The crate falls from his arms, spilling the shards of glowing lyrium across the white snow – like viscera spattered across the ground.

Fenris crouches, choking back a low sound in his throat. He knows what this means. He understands, and though the thought is awful, he would be as silent as the forest around him. If he cultivates silence, he thinks distantly, perhaps he will hear none of the singing chafing the inside of his skin. Instead, he gathers the fallen crystals. He carries them to the temple. He puts one foot before the next.

The sky above darkens to pitch, and even the fire he has blazing at the temple’s heart, the sickly glow of the lyrium bristling around the pedestal at its very center, are not enough to permit him to continue.

Fenris returns to the Venatori camp. He melts snow, and it’s like drinking the chill of winter when he tips it down his throat. Something to break the fever, at least for the moment.

It begins like that, an ache beneath his skin. Something familiar.

He sleeps; he wakes; he returns to work. The pain stays familiar, but it grows far more cruel. An intimate friend, an enemy pretending at tenderness before the final twist of the knife. He forces himself to and from the temple. If the mage cries out, begging for more water, or for a blanket, or for a hard piece of bread, he does not hear her: he hears nothing beyond the distant echo of Hawke’s laugh, and the off-kilter song whispering just to the margins of his thoughts. It chases him as he slips between trees to lyrium shards farther and farther from the fallen temple; it rasps at his mind as he piles the shards higher and higher. Shrill and raucous, a pain scraping against his sinew.

It is worse at night. Then, without the monotony of labour, the dull insistence that his body push forward through the pain, he wakes, cold. Gasps to consciousness, fire and ice prickling beneath his skin, writhing its way up his lyrium veins. His back arcs, breath catching in the tight passage of his throat. White dots prick his eyes, blind him, a howling rattling against his eardrums but –

Hawke should be here. Always, he’s here when Fenris needs him. Calloused hands steady, the soft sound of his voice a balm against the magic spitting itself to life within him – foul, wretched, cruel.

Now, there is no one.

He gasps. His hands tear at the blankets. His skin sears, mouth tasting like blood and the sharp feel of magic and the chill of night. Like coals against his tongue, like frostbitten fingertips. Like the whole world collapsing in upon him, condensing into a cold, hard core in the center of his chest. It pins him in place, a specimen of all the things that might go wrong when one searches too deeply into realms best left to the dead.

Eventually it stops, as all things must. The low thrumming recedes to the agony of infection, the delirious pounding of his heart.

The inside of the narrow tent is cast in a sickly red light, one that pulsates with each jagged breath. One familiar in this vile mountains, in this corrupt place. One familiar from Kirkwall, from the Deep Roads –

He knew there would be a price to pay. He had not anticipated it would be – _this._

Sweat trickles down the taut line of his throat, fingers shaking around the fistfuls of damp blanket he grasped in desperation.

In the distance, a song.

He licks his lips, eyes fluttering shut.

He has known the aches of battle. He has known pain far worse – but never has he known hopeless pain. Not since the darkest days of his slavery, from which he’d held no hope of succor.

It is a hard feeling to pin, this infection: unlike a fever, a lingering illness, a delirium, and yet all of those. A palimpsest of each wretched moment he has lived through, but far worse for the promise of the foul future that lies ahead. It finds him in the quiet moments, in the pounding of his heart as he chisels away at infected lyrium, hauls it to the crumbling temple; it finds him when his eyes flutter shut in the darkness of night, when the spare light he can conjure from flame and wood fails to be adequate, even for his eyes.

Description matters little enough in the end. The result is the same, whether or not Fenris can think of the perfect way to describe the prickling beneath his skin, the heat burning up his veins, the endless cold pit where his heart used to beat. He will succumb, whether or not the dizzy spiral of his thoughts lights on the proper _words._

Foolish things to think of, while he trudges through the snow, beaten by winds and ice so fine and insistent it’s like a rasp against his exposed skin. Foolish things to think of, while he feels himself sliding from this place into –

Something else.

But words are easy. Words are finite. They are small, precise and measured. Collections of sounds that somehow correlate to meaning. Little shapes, once so mysterious, dripped across pages in tidy little columns and rows.

The rest of it is not so simple – the way his mind begins to slip out from his control, like a half-wild horse with white-flashing eyes and the bit snapped tight in its sharp teeth; the itching beneath his skin, hot and cold and _foul;_ the hollow space where once he felt his heart beating. It takes less time than he had anticipated for his intentions to scatter before him: words with letters rendered insensible, that add to nothing beyond rows of _action._ He finds lyrium; he gathers it; he returns it to the temple; he stops in front of the mage. “Enough?” he asks.

He can’t recall why. Too often he loses the _why._ Pages printed backward. Books bound  in reverse.

She shakes her head, eyes deep-set within her skull, lips chapped, skin the pallor of a death mask. “Soon.”

It is taking all of him, piece by piece. Fenris is himself often enough to know that, like gasping for air after plunging beneath ocean waves. A salty, hard breath prior to being slammed again toward the dark depths below.

It is taking all of him, any meager hopes he might have held, his mind, his _comprehension_ –

He knows what this means: it will take Hawke from him as well. A vanished voice, a forgotten face.

He is becoming absence and madness and agony. He is becoming nothing at all.


	6. vi

> _When I have lost all else, when my eyes fail me_
> 
> _And the taste of blood fills my mouth, then_
> 
> _In the pounding of my heart_
> 
> _I hear the glory of creation._
> 
> (Trials 1:7)

*

The lyrium is a chorus within him. With each heartbeat, it trembles, alive and wretched. He lives within its siren song, the long hours of fevered dreaming, the nightmares nearly as wretched as waking. At first, a cacophony that drowned him, choked him on agony and delirium and the low red burning behind his eyelids. Now –

He had believed becoming _nothing_ was the darkest fate before him, that becoming a series of disconnected actions would be the worst reality before him. That, perhaps, he would forget why he crept his way across the snow, trudged weary paths to and from the decrepit temple; that even as he pulled Hawke from the Fade, he would forget his name, his face, his touch, his laugh. That he would be an absence when Hawke returns.

Now, however –

It is better, he thinks, to become nothing at all than to become a perversion of that which he once was. For each thing he held dear – a small enough number, a spare fistful of precious things – to become corrupted by this wretched infection…

In the cold of the mountains, he becomes a low, red song, and each note is Hawke. Vile, but a melody familiar enough to gift him faltering moments of clarity.

He wakes to himself, surfacing for air, and he can hear nothing but the rasp of Hawke’s voice, gone ragged with weariness.

_Why didn’t you come?_

_I am trying_ , he thinks.

He swallows, throat tight. Dry. Inch by miserable inch, he pushes himself from the damp tangle of his blankets. Eases out of the tent. Each movement – the rasp of fabric against his skin, the hard caress of the cold air beyond the canvas – is agony, too much violent sensation. Sweat prickles along his temple, runs in rivulets down the back of his neck. His veins throb a furious red, an extension of the sickness in his heart.

Still, he moves forward, gasping for breath outside of the tent flap.

The sky above is a hungry blue, one that would lick the marrow from his bones and leave him a ruined husk. His fingers dig into the snow, which becomes a chill wetness against the fevered palms of his hands.

In the distance, footsteps.

Fenris chokes out a thin sound. Turns, his neck tight.

_I came looking for you_ , a familiar voice. Sunshine and panacea.

He might respond, but he can’t, all the words caught in his throat. Buzzing against his tongue.

_This doesn’t look good_ , says Hawke, emerging from between the skeletal trees, brow furrowed. His shadow falls across Fenris, returns him to the cool darkness. Shields him from the vicious sky above.

Hawke crouches, hand settling against Fenris’s shoulder. _Thank the Maker I found you_ , he breathes. The skin around his eyes crinkles.

Fenris huffs, fingers curling and uncurling in the snow. “Hawke,” he grinds out, a ragged sound. Desperate.

A smile. His hand moves, cups the shape of Fenris’s head, fingers steady against his sweat-damp hair. “It’s alright,” Hawke says. “You knew I’d come back in the end. It was just tricky. Not everyone can escape the Fade! Thankfully, I’m not _everyone.”_

He reaches, tucks an arm around Fenris and tugs him up. Presses him close against his body, and for a moment all Fenris can feel is the heat of his skin, the steadiness of his touch, how he smells just the same – like pine and magic and smoke.

Fenris sags against him, hand reaching out, tangling itself in the front of his robes. “Hawke,” he gasps out again, head falling to Hawke’s shoulder.

The lyrium in his veins starts to vibrate, a dark creature waking from slumber and to a ravenous hunger. It shifts beneath his skin, coiling and uncoiling, stretching. Stare fixing on the bright man holding Fenris.

It’s wrong, _wrong_ and _dangerous_ and –

“Wait,” Fenris groans, leaning back, but Hawke holds him close all the same, forehead creased with concern.

“It’s alright,” Hawke repeats.

Then it’s not. Energy crackles beneath Fenris’s skin, scrambling its way up his arm. It shoots forth – an arrow loosed from a bow, shards of red lyrium slicing through the thin skin of his wrist, the tips of his fingers. He tries to pull away but –

How many hearts has he cut to shreds in his life?

This one is nothing like any that came before.

A gasp from Hawke’s throat. Blood, from his familiar mouth. His eyes, dark and wide and –

Fenris wakes.

He wakes, and wishes he had not. Better still to never wake – but if his nightmares are as such, then –

There is no peace to be had. There is none. And yet –

For a moment, _it’s alright_ , Hawke had murmured. The smell of Hawke’s skin. The feel of his body.

His smile.

Fenris’s pulse pounds against his eardrums, sickly, unsteady. He licks his lips, staring up at the canvas of the tent, which is cast with an infected red – the red of puffed skin, the red of blood long since clotted.

Sleep beckons, and when it finds him next, it’s with nightmares much the same. Vile, but –

For the moments _before,_ for the span of time before it dissolves to horror, he is with Hawke.

Just there, between breaths. For a brief moment.

Hawke.

And so he dreams, and so he wakes, and so he waits. A mere echo of the man he knew, the briefest turn of the song within him toward something bright, but –

Almost enough.

So says the woman in her cage. _Almost,_ her voice a dry rasp. Her hair brittle around her face. Her lips bleeding. _And then you’ll let me go_.

He doesn’t hear her: he hears only _almost,_ and so he continues working.

Fenris becomes weak, his body broken, his mind a wild beast. He stops, even when the sun is a white orb in the sky; he stops and he sleeps. He wakes and he walks.

When the mage says, _it’s time_ , he undoes the lock. She crawls forward, sobbing out parched, cracked sounds. _Thank you_ , a gasped iteration.

He reaches down as she stares up at him with glassy eyes. His hand falls to her hollowed cheek. Beneath his skin, the red glow of infection; it catches the sheen of her eyes, which blink up at him. An empty stare. A hope she forsakes, like dying embers. He sees it go out.

Just like that, she knows.

Fenris snaps her neck. He can’t hear Hawke chide him, but he can _feel_ Hawke hovering just off to the side. Frowning.

He will sleep before he stands at the precipice of this ritual. Before he peels the layers of the Veil back and looks into the Fade.

He would hear Garrett’s voice once more.

Fenris doesn’t bother returning to the cluttered camp outside of the temple. Instead, he sinks into a crouch against the cold wall, head tipping back. The red inside of his eyelids pounds as he coughs, his lungs crusted with lyrium crystals – but it is a song that becomes a lullabye, one that sees him off to sleep.

He has held no hope for himself, but, he thinks between ragged breaths, he has saved enough for this: that Hawke will fall through the Veil and into this cold forest. That Fenris will see his smile once again, uncorrupted by the nightmares that hound even his waking moments.

He has hope enough for that. He has faith enough for that.


	7. vii

> _You have grieved as I have._
> 
> _You, who made worlds out of nothing._
> 
> _We are alike in sorrow, sculptor and clay,_
> 
> _Comforting each other in our art._
> 
> (Trials 1:8)

*

Hawke is careless.

For a man who so readily shoulders the burdens of the world, of each street urchin and mine worker and escaped slave turned to revenge, he spares little concern for himself.

It will be the death of him, of that much Fenris is certain. Always in battle he must keep a careful eye on Hawke, who flings barriers across Fenris until it’s as though the magic becomes his second skin, but leaves his own back unguarded.

This time is no different, Hawke far too focused on bandits Fenris fights to notice the assassin at his hip. Fenris doesn’t see the blade catch him, but he _does_ hear the shocked sound Hawke makes. The pained gasp. Feels the way Hawke’s magic snaps back, curled to guarding himself – though too _late._

Fenris ends the rest of them with fury pounding through his veins, singing him to frenzy. By the time he’s turned to help Hawke, the assassin long since reduced to little more than a charred corpse, Hawke has already started to knit himself back together –

Though _seeing_ that does little to settle the frantic terror that makes Fenris’s heart beat itself ragged against his ribs.

Foolish, _thoughtless_ man.

Fenris glares, wiping blood from his cheeks. “You were reckless,” he growls, because it’s true and perhaps Hawke will finally _hear_ him when he says it this time.

Hawke is pale. Sitting on a crate at the edge of the bandit camp. Now that he’s put the soft skin of his side back together, he’s also grinning. Pleased with himself. “You love me,” he says, confident.

Fenris scoffs. “I love an idiot.”

“But you _do,”_ continues Hawke happily. “Love me, that is.”

It is very nearly enough to soothe the irritation prickling between his eyes, the lingering panic humming down his lyrium veins. Still, Fenris folds his arms hard across his chest, evaluating Hawke – the easy tilt of his head, the weariness that pulls his body into a downward arc. How he’s planted an elbow on one knee to look nonchalant, though it’s clear that he has done so because he can’t sit upright.

“Evidently, I am not without weakness. Or folly.”

Hawke still grins at him, and Fenris only feels his frown grow darker.

“You spare no thought for yourself,” he continues.

“I spare a thought or two,” Hawke insists. “Usually ones that involve _you_ without your spiky _armour.”_

It’s meant to be charming, but falls flat. Fenris looks away, staring out at the mountain path that trails down the slope beneath them. The Templars here have teeth, and were clever enough to spot Hawke as soon as they laid eyes on him.

Which is why Hawke had insisted on splitting with the rest of their group and heading for the mountains. He tried to send Fenris away as well but –

Hardly.

He doesn’t know how to explain any of this.

“I am not fragile,” Fenris says, level, though he continues to looks away. Still, the air tastes like the sharp tang of magic, the crackle of electricity, the stench of charred bodies. “I do not require your protection, Hawke. I survived for many years on my own. Though it is – good to be at your side, I would not see you made foolhardy because of it.”

Hawke shifts on his crate, sighing – a sound genuine enough that it draws Fenris’s gaze. Hawke reaches and pushes his hair, stringy with sweat and blood, from his forehead. He looks at his feet for the span of several heartbeats, then back. Uneasy. “I _know,”_ he says finally. “I know you can take care of yourself. It’s not that. Of course it’s not.”

_Of course it’s not_ , he says, as if he makes any sense.

Still, Fenris waits. He has learned this much: for all his bluster, Hawke requires silences.

Fenris understands, because he requires silences as well. Space into which he can free little clusters of words, the wide open sky. Stretches of time usually filled with idle chatter.

Sometimes it takes too long for Fenris’s words to work themselves loose. He is trying to improve. _This_ is him trying.

“I just – can’t lose anyone else,” Hawke says finally, more of a breath than a statement. Words soft and quiet, nearly snatched away in the wind slipping down the face of the mountain. “I _can’t.”_

Distantly, Fenris wonders if Hawke hears the echo of his own words, or if it is merely the similar shape of their wounded hearts that has led them back around to this.

Fenris steps over the smoking body of a bandit. He wanders closer, but not close enough to touch. “Tell me,” he says, when it’s clear that Hawke has finished speaking, that he has offered explanation enough – now staring at his blood-spattered hands, fingers curling and uncurling. “Do you think you have the world’s portion of sorrow?”

“Do I –” starts Hawke, eyes flashing up.

An irritated sound grinds out of Fenris’s throat.

Foolish, _reckless_ man.

“Do not think you are the only man with a heart buried so deeply in another,” Fenris says, low. He steps closer still, measuring the distance between them, how Hawke leans back – shocked, eyes wide. “You throw yourself into peril on my behalf. If you fell –” He stops.

It is a thought he won’t give voice. Too often, they have stood upon this precipice.

Perhaps Fenris should have learned to stop expecting anything else. Though he had hoped that Hawke might now develop something like _temperance._

Hawke shifts his weight again. Sniffs. Sighs. “Maker,” he mutters. “That might almost be romantic – the _heart_ bit – if you weren’t always ripping them out. I’m just trying to stop you from doing that to me. Metaphorically, though literally works as well.”

He says it with a laugh that placates some of the coiled tension in Fenris’s chest. Fenris huffs. “You have nothing to fear,” he says. “So long as you start guarding your flank.”

“But that’s why I have you!” Hawke insists, perking up immediately. He pushes himself up, one large hand reaching out to touch the skin of Fenris’s arm – a warm, steady weight, though still he’s pale. “Besides, it’s a bit of a challenge to watch my own back. One of the problems with _necks.”_

Fenris shakes his head with a dry laugh. “Better a sore neck than an open gut, Hawke.” He stays near Hawke’s side as they turn toward the narrow path wending its way up the mountain, away from the foul remains of this bandit’s camp.

Still, Hawke’s hand rests on his shoulder, the man smiling down at Fenris. Despite his pallor, despite the blood drying across his cheeks, despite the weariness that leaves his shoulders a downward curve. Always he has a smile for Fenris. “If I’m going to have a sore neck,” Hawke says, eyes glinting in the distant sunlight, “I can think of a _bevy_ of different ways we might accomplish that – except much more fun.”

“There’ll be no _fun_ if you don’t show some sense,” Fenris intones.

Later, he expects more of the same foolishness. After all, Hawke has always been this way – stumbling from one fight to the next, gleefully assured of his own survival even when he has come to know loss more intimately than any lover.

But the next week, when they round a corner and run into a cluster of Templars who’d long since given up on ever chasing Hawke down, the fight is –

Orderly, almost. Hawke draws back, flinging furious spells off before the Templars can tamp him down, as Fenris charges past their gleaming shields and severs arms from torsos. He glances over his shoulder, watching Hawke –

Who watches him back, mouth twisted into a hard line. Eyes wild with concern. He is pale and worried.

He is also _wary._

They have, each of them, lost more than enough, Fenris thinks once the Templars are dispatched with and he and Hawke head again through the wilds. Certainly, they deserve this much: whatever meager existence they can carve out in the Marches.

So long as they have each other, it will be enough. Through the dark, cold nights, in the midst of vicious battles, so long as they at each other’s sides, the rest of it matters not.

There is no one else. There could be no one else.


	8. viii

_ _

> * * *
> 
>  
> 
> _Do not grieve for me, Maker of All._
> 
> _Though all others may forget You,_
> 
> _Your name is etched into my every step._
> 
> _I will not forsake You, even if I forget myself._
> 
> (Trials 1:9)

*

He parts the Veil, though he can barely stand upright as he does so. The lyrium within him burns, screams with all the intense fury of the sun, but still Fenris _pushes._ The sky before him oscillates. The mountains shriek.

A tearing sound, a rasp. Cracking, as the crystals arrayed around the temple splinter.

Fenris’s knuckles are white as he grasps the edges of the pedestal. His throat is closed, heart beating itself ragged against his ribs.

_Hawke,_ he thinks, his lover’s name a shining focal point. He grasps it, draws it close.

_Hawke,_ and the shape of his smile, the smell of his skin. _Hawke._

The Veil thins before him, bright and scintillating. Waves of colour rippling in the air. He squints, gasping for air – which is thin, now, watery. The window shifts, the lost magic latched to Fenris’s intent. Though his mind has slipped away from him, he was careful in his preparations: the realm of dreams has found the core of Fenris’s own, and shifts around that purpose.

Another ripple, and a shadow materializes, distant, obscured – but so familiar that a low sound breaks free of Fenris’s throat. The shape clarifies, and it is like glimpsing Hawke through a gauzy sheet drying on a line. His body, familiar; the echo of a laugh Fenris knows in his bones.

The wind snaps around him, and the illusion gives way. A turn, an easy glance. Sunlight glints off eyes too black to be Hawke’s, a smile far too sharp. Some foul thing standing in his shadow, some vile creature looking for a way _out._

At first, Fenris stares into the beast’s empty eyes. Feels the same Void roaring against his ears.

No.

_No._

But –

If Hawke was alive, it would have worked. Fenris understands enough of sacrifice, of the echo of blood, the clear systems of exchange, for that. Years spent under the yoke of a magister taught him this much: wild though it may be, magic is governed by systems of rules. It becomes a slave, though one that is rabid.

If Hawke were alive –

Which means he isn’t. Which means Hawke is dead, and Fenris is left –

Touched. Contaminated. Made foul with the sickening certainty of the progress of the sun through the sky. He slams the window shut, and a broken sound tears free from his throat – bloody and jagged and forever beyond repair.

It didn’t work, and so this _is_ the world in which Fenris lives: one without Hawke.

Though it is not a world in which he will live for long. Not as the song burnt into his skin grows unsteady, a hissing chorus more suited to oblivion than the snowy wastelands in the south. He crouches on the cracked temple stones, head pounding, heart an endless void within him. Hands splayed, arm trembling as he braces himself against the ground.

Against the inside of his forearm, white veins flush red, a colour that yowls with the fury of the Void. Like those creatures the Venatori have shaped, things from nightmare. And now Fenris has become one.

Instead of Hawke’s voice murmuring his name, only this: the wind around him, the vicious snow. Failure, despair, an infection clotted in his heart, a song he cannot burn away.

He has lost everything. He gasps for breath, head spinning. Inside of his skin, the crawling feel of lyrium, alive and famished. It will consume him, this miserable place, this awful world. It will devour him whole, until he becomes everything he hates.

In the end, it is as simple as this: he always knew Tevinter would find him, return to tear his life to shreds.

How he hates to be right in this.

Fenris knows what he will become. Already, the enemy has taken a great man; he knows that with a certainty that blots out all else, that leaves him smaller than a child in the shadow of despair. The very least he can do is resist this final occupation. It is something he knew he would be required to do from that very first moment of pulsing infection, but –

How he hoped. How he believed. How certain he had been that if only he _tried_ hard enough –

A stupid, romantic notion. How very soft. How –

He laughs. Brittle. Broken. Hunched as he is on the stone with the winds roaring around him.

_If you fell_ , Fenris once started.

He could not finish the thought then. Now he can.

_If you fell, I would lose myself_.

He has come right to the very precipice, these last bare moments of integrity. Endured for the sake of a hope shown to be hollow.

It is time.

Fenris coughs until he can no longer draw breath, until the world reels around him. He stumbles past the Venatori camp; he will not lay to rest in the heart of this wretched place. He stumbles through the woods, licked by the flames of a fever he cannot quench. Against his eardrums, the pounding reminder of his failure.

Hawke, gone.

Hawke, dead.

Both of them, lost.

He pushes his way past grasping trees, thoughtless. Stumbles and falls, his legs gone weak beneath him. For a moment, he rests, snow wet against his throat, his jaw, his cheek. Cold.

He rolls, blinking up at the wide, blue sky above. Shadows cut across his vision – distant clouds, branches moving in the wind. He thinks, a vague impression more than a coherent notion, that it might be fitting if he were to see a hawk, here at the end.

He waits, licks his cracked lips. Stares upwards.

Nothing but the cruel sky. Nothing but the pinprick of light against the backs of his eyes.

It was a foolish sentiment, but –

One of which Hawke might approve. How soft-hearted he was. How much he softened Fenris’s heart. Left him –

Free.

_I am yours_.

A choice.

As this is a choice.

His hands curl around the hilt of the blade he has kept close to him since this all began. His fingers tighten as well as they can when left weakened by the lyrium burning within him.

He blinks up at the sky. Breathing is difficult, shallow and thick with the rustling of crystals within his lungs. Like the empty branches above, clattering against each other in the howling wind; that lives inside of him, though it is far more foul.

Still, Fenris has enough in him for this. He has saved this much of who he was, this bare measure of the man who once stood steadfast at Hawke’s side; the man who once was so certain of waking to have Hawke by him, of forever seeing his smile, of forever hearing the rumble of his laugh.

That man endures for this last insistence – that he not relinquish this final piece of who he was, this shadow of what he had with Hawke. Fenris presses the tip of the blade against his breastbone.

Once, he heard Hawke in the space between breaths. Hawke, like a blade between his ribs.

The tip of the knife digs into his skin, armour long since discarded.

If he listens past the song the lyrium sings, if he listens beyond the sludgy beating of his own heart, beyond the laboured breaths that become gasps in his tight throat, he can almost hear Hawke. A soft, rasped laugh, though perhaps it is the wind. Against his weak hands, the feel of Hawke’s – larger, calloused, always warm, always humming with latent magic. Once it might have made Fenris jerk away –

Now, an intimacy.

He draws the blade closer, as though embracing a long lost friend. A dead lover.

It parts the skin of his chest, and comes home to the muscle of his heart.

His hands are limp. His eyes flutter.

Above, the sky is blue, shadows flickering at the edges of his eyesight – gentle, careful, a buzzing that sounds like _going home_.

Against the skin of his temple, the feeling of a mouth, warm. A beard scratching.

The wide sky above, and whatever lies beyond.

*


End file.
